Electronic communications between persons for both business and personal use are now extensively used. In addition to e-mail communications and telephone communications, additional forms of communication are common, including instant messaging, social network messaging and commenting, message board posting, and text messaging.
Conventional computing systems and devices are configured to support applications such as e-mail or instant messaging that implement an address book. The address book may be accessed by a user of the application (or by the application itself) for a variety of purposes. Typically, the address book is unique for a given application and may contain unique application specific data.
In conventional applications, each address book entry must be manually entered and maintained by a user. Over time, some entries become outdated due to a lack of regular maintenance, while other entries become obsolete. As the number of contacts grow, the maintenance of the address book may become difficult and time consuming.
Further, access to the address book during regular usage of a personal communication device typically requires that the user manually navigate to an address book screen of the device using a combination of buttons, keys (e.g., keys located on the face of a phone or other user device), and other cursor navigational devices, and/or the clicking on one or more icons or highlighted regions located on a screen of a user interface of the device. In addition, the foregoing navigation results in the user being presented a different screen in order to access the information in the address book. Finally, the user must typically manually type a few letters corresponding to a person's name in order to search for and obtain that person's information from among all of the typically numerous records stored in the address book.